


jusqu'à ce que le temps meure

by orphan_account



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Moulin Rouge! Fusion, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-01
Updated: 2019-02-01
Packaged: 2019-10-20 03:47:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17614847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: “You know this is my business don’t you?” Cheryl whispers, half question, half resignation, biting her roughed lower lip, “and you still don’t have the money for it.”“I will,” Toni replies over the muffled brothel noises in the rooms below, “one day, I will.”





	jusqu'à ce que le temps meure

_un_

“You know this is my business don’t you?” Cheryl whispers, half question, half resignation, biting her roughed lower lip, “and you still don’t have the money for it.”

“I will,” Toni replies over the muffled brothel noises in the rooms below, “one day, I will.”

“I know.” Cheryl says fondly and tosses Toni’s messenger bag - filled with her worn notebooks, and leaky fountain pens - on to the chair she’s shoved up under the door handle and reclines back into the tangle of sheets on the bed. The room still reeks of smoke and sex and terror as it always does when Toni stumbles in through her window silhouetted by the waxing moon.  

(“Well, hello there my knight in shining armor,” Cheryl greets her, perched on the bed as Toni crawls through the window, “come to read me another one of your bedtime stories?”) 

Her hair is hellfire red (fitting, seeing as she is Toni’s damnation as well as her salvation) and she holds the swanlike arch of her cheekbones under graceless ink-stained fingers and kiss her anyway, and she lets her, for free.  Despair lurks in the bruisy shadows under Cheryl’s eyes when she says “I love you” but Toni kisses her like she can’t see it, sings her gentle songs that she  
makes up staring at her ceiling at night, strokes her skin.  Touches her like she’s hers.

Toni thinks if she’s ever going to write it’s going to be about Cheryl.  Because Paris is for lovers and Paris is for Toni and she, in the soft milky planes of her body that never see sunlight and the nighttime glisten in her eyes and the way Toni’s skin sticks to hers, and Toni doesn’t have the money to afford her (truly, she’s worth too much for anyone to afford) but there’s no place for Toni Topaz in the world but wrapped up in Cheryl Blossom, like a sinew wrapped around a bone.

Cheryl coughs low, wet and hacking. (“It’s the cigarettes,” she explains, “they’re cheap. Some German garbage I stole from Veronica.”)  Tells Toni she’s got enough set by to wait until she has the money to buy her off the brothel.  Promises she doesn’t sleep with anyone else. 

Drunk on the madness of the love that devours her, Toni believes her.

 

_deux_

(Sometimes Toni thinks the high flush on Cheryl’s cheekbones is real, but she knows by now that the stage-manager loves his whores to look bright and vivid and wild.

Cheryl never seems to tire.

There’s something brilliant about her that wakes equal desperation in Toni.)

 

_trois_

“You gotta stop coming to see me,” Cheryl says, and she won’t look at Toni.

“Why?” The jilted lover asks, tears collecting in her eyes.

(“Why, tell me what’s wrong, what happened, you said you’d be ready.  I have the tickets for the Island, and you and I will live in sunlight, and I will feed you clementines, and we will never be afraid of men with money and guns and dogs again.” she thinks but won’t say.)

“You - you gotta stop coming to see me,” Cheryl repeats and her voice is very thick.  She’s in all black today, gloves on. (She looks like an angel of death - sent from the Heavens to steal Toni’s soul from her chest) Her face is gray like cigarette ash or overcast skies, “it’s over.”

“Cheryl, my heart, my soul, my breath, my love, what is the matter? I don’t understand,” Toni thinks she says, she’s not sure, because the world is splintering at the edges.

“It was nice,” the red headed whore says.  Her body is like a statue.

“You love me,” Toni cries, “I don’t understand; you love me.”

“Please don’t make this difficult,” Cheryl pleads, all smiles, expression hard as the diamonds on her choker, the jewels the prince’s cousin gave her, and Toni understands everything, she feels a knife twisting in her guts that rips her to shreds, “It is my occupation to make fools believe I love them.”

Within her heart there is only one long, scraping howl of torment, but Toni cannot produce sound.  Something inside her is broken.

“I’m sorry,” Cheryl whispers and pulls away from Toni’s graceless, ink-stained fingers to leave her, alone by the gutters.

(She takes the world with her.)

 

_quatre_

Toni loses time. She wanders, and the city opens its dark heart to her, and somewhere she is drinking someone else’s absinthe, watching the clear green louche to pearly opacity, smelling the high thin reek of burnt sugar, feeling reality come unmoored behind her eyes. Then she’s somewhere else entirely, and it’s thin, vinegary wine, the kind of shit the students drank before they drummed up an attempt at émeute in the eighteen-twenties. It makes her violently ill: she doesn’t care. She doesn’t care about anything. She is lost. She has always been lost.  
Somehow she finds herself back at her lodgings as the birds begin to sing Clair De Lune in the city’s palace-parks, and she wonders, staring at her worn typewriter, why she bothered to come home.

 

_cinq_

“Have you heard she’s dying?” Sweet Pea hiccups from where he’s sat across from her, gently nursing his long cigarette, “that pretty young thing with the sweet tenor at the whore house, the one you used to rave over.  And it’s a damn shame for them, I mean, how are they going to replace a voice like that with a face so pretty?  Not quick, for sure, and a steep loss for them, too, I heard the Marquis took a liking to the songbird, and they won’t be getting another penny out of him.  Poor thing.  Are you all right?  You look poorly yourself - hey, pay for your goddamned tab before you take off - hey!.”

He curses her as she runs off, the tips of his ears turning red as Cheryl’s hair. But fuck it, fuck him. Cheryl is dying, and the world is god awful and ugly as ever - fuck everything. 

 

_six_

Toni beats at the brothel doors until her palms are bloody with splinters, like a madman, until they have to let her in or have her arrested again.

She is pale like candlewax, thin and fragile against the linen sickbed and her eyes are tawny glass and when she sees her, oh, when she sees her, she blinks through a haze of morphine and fever, sweat-slick brow, blood-stench air. 

The doctor leaves when Toni begins to sob, kneeling on the dirty floor.

“I will love you,” she says, “until time dies.”  Soft and tired.

“Come away with me,” Toni begs, “come away with me, we will go to the sanatoriums, to the baths, I’ll take you to Spain, to Italy, we can run away together -“

Cheryl is crying.  The tears roll down her face like stars falling by lamplight.  “You don’t have the money for it,” she laughs, and brings Toni’s hand to her burning lips, and presses kisses to her knuckles.  “Love -“

And then the wet hard coughs return, and Toni holds her, holds her as if that could change the universe, as if her touch and her love, however glorious, could do anything at all.

They pull her away from the body in the morning.  
  


_sept_

(And because narrative causality is not stronger than M. tuberculosis, nor is love, months after that fearful night Toni Topaz finds herself restless, feverish, with the beginnings of a little dry cough that will come and go but never again entirely leave her, until it has had its way. Perhaps she finds this fitting.

Perhaps she finds it just.

No matter, she would not take it back for anything under the sun, or beyond it.)


End file.
